This session is an exceptional opportunity to welcome our partners from the University of Tokyo to Paris, thanks to the visit of Professor Torahiko Terada. Come in large numbers! We will hear several communications:

According to Anne-Marie Christin (Histoire de l’écriture. De l’idéogramme au multimedia, 2012), the particularity of the alphabet consists in “breaking the links that then retained all the writings to their support as to their essential complement […] by freeing itself from the visible and manipulable space that had always governed writing, it had become an instrument of almost abstract classification, and therefore more reliable”. In doing so, according to Christin, “the writing betrays the visible while pretending to pay homage to it”. Writing was born, in fact, from a “crossbreeding” of two modes of communication that every human society had used since prehistoric times: speech and image. The first allows the community to maintain its structures and heritage, while the second, which gives access to an invisible universe belonging to the gods, guarantees communication between man and divine existence. Japanese writing, which mixes 3 writing systems – the Chinese character of the ideogram and the hiragana and katakana, two syllabaries developed from it – or even 4 writing systems – the Western alphabet, in addition – influences the making of the Japanese “catalogue”, a space par excellence mixing writing and image. This paper is a reflection on the figurative diversity in Japanese catalogues that reveals a happy relationship between text and image.

Professor at the University of Tokyo (Graduate school of Arts and Sciences, Department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature and Culture Course), Torahiko TERADA is co-author of various publications (Text and image, tribute to Anne-Marie Christin, Suiseisha, 2018, Paris, une des capitales du XIXe siècle, Chikurinsha, 2016, etc.) in Japanese, French, and English, on the question of the relationship between text and image.